The mid-'70s Funny Car match-race scene in the Northeast was like a Frank Zappa album come to life. There were crazy folks everywhere back then, but these guys, well, they were something else. Driver Joe Jacono never won a major title in those days-his main claim to fame was a magazine story that showed him dressed as a caveman in a quarry banging rocks together with his '73 Rollin' Stoned Plymouth 'Cuda flopper in the background. Those who saw that photo never forgot it, and many assumed this party-hard/drive-harder wild man was headed for a Darwin Award-winning demise.

In that context, seeing Joe back behind the wheel of that same flopper in 2005 is as mind-blowing as anything on Bongo Fury. Some of his former compatriots are gone; others would rather talk about the good old days than strap into a fiberglass beast of yore to let it all hang out again. But now, thanks to Pennsylvania sportsman racer Bob Rosetty, the original Rollin' Stoned flopper has been restored to perfection and reunited with its most famous driver.

We were at the one-time-only Funny Car race promoted by Ron Bradshaw in St. Louis last September and caught up with Joe, who was making hot laps in the mid 7s with a load of methanol in the tank. Now in his 70s, Joe looks like a healthy version of Jerry Garcia and is remarkably well preserved considering how hard he once pushed the envelope.

"I started racing in 1954 or 1955 when I was growing up in South Philadelphia," he says with the in-your-face accent the neighborhood is still known for. "We'd never go to the dragstrip back then-that was for sissies. I had a '40 Ford with a worked Cadillac engine, and we would run a mile on the roads back in the swamps. It had to be that long 'cause you couldn't stop back then, anyhow..." With that introduction, the stories, colorfully laced with words you normally don't repeat in mixed company, just keep coming.

Life was tough on the street for hot rodders, and Jacono recalls that the first time he decided to go to a dragstrip (one had just opened in Woodbine, New Jersey), he and his pals got in a big fight in a Jersey diner and ended up in jail instead. That experienced soured him-he never got in that much trouble street racing. The Ford was followed by a 13-second Olds, and then, after a trip down to the drags at Daytona Beach during Speed Weeks in 1957, he decided to build a dragster.

In true hot rodding fashion, he took the road less traveled. After buying a buzz-box welder and building a couple of rudimentary trailers to practice, he chalked out a design on the floor of his dad's garage. He then built the car out of pipes-real plumbing pipes with threaded ends-that were cut, massaged, and welded back together.

"I was the smartest guy in the world back then-nobody could tell me anything. A circle track guy named Jack Hart who worked for my dad tried to help me, but I took everything as criticism. What did this guy know about these cars? That was my attitude, even though he was a good driver and car builder. Anyhow, I squared it and welded it up on a jig made of cinder blocks, fabricated up mounts for the engine and rear, and put it all together. It had no suspension other then the tires."

At the Florida beach's Flagler-Bunnell airport in the winter of 1958, the new car was very skittish and none other then Red Vogt and Smokey Yunick came to his rescue. After they got the front-end sorted out in the shop, Vogt gave Jacono a tobacco bag full of Stromberg jets and a couple of tuning recommendations. That evening, the car went straight as an arrow and top-ended at 142 mph.

After several successful years in the East Coast gas ranks, Joe hooked up with Delaware's Biddy Winward and got his first dose of pop in the Brief Encounter digger. By 1968, he had taken the reigns of the Walt Barbin/Cooper Hayden Hi-Roller ride and won the Division One NHRA Fuel Dragster title, cranking off a string of 6.50s.

In the meantime, Joe had also opened a gas station in Newport, Delaware, which was pretty close to the center of the Northeast Funny Car action. The times were a changin' and writing was on the wall, so he and Winward partnered up to buy one of the old SOHC Tasca Ford Mustangs. After testing and licensing at Atco (Prudhomme and Kalitta signed off for him), his friend Norm Taylor's irate girlfriend doused the Mustang with gasoline and burned it to the ground right on the ramp truck before it ever got paid for a booking. "Yeah, that took us out of the Funny Car business for a while," Joe recalls.

Once they regrouped from that debacle, he and Biddy bought one of the fastest cars in the country, John Mazmanian's '70 'Cuda, right after Pomona in 1971. This was the candy-apple 'Cuda that Rich Siroonian had driven to several 220-mph record blasts.

Joe and Biddy raced the Mazmanian car until 1972 when they parted ways and Joe ventured deeper into the Funny Car scene on his own. He commissioned Woody Gilmore to build a car that would be the climax of Joe's career, and burst onto the match-race scene with it in 1973, winning the tough Division One AA/FC opener. Joe raced hard and furiously until corporate sponsorships made the independent racer an endangered species.

Touring was done mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, where Jacono was part of Frank LeSeuer's Funny Car circuit with guys like Kosty Ivanoff, George Reese, and an occasional appearance by Jungle Jim. While it was all fun and games on the outside, Joe and Jungle had an internal rivalry going, always looking at ways to one-up each other. Joe recalls the time Jungle was going to drive from West Chester, Pennsylvania, to Newport, Connecticut, to pick up some spare Plexiglas. Jacono had a friendly cop pull him over and arrest him as a joke because Liberman hadn't sent Jungle Pam down to get it.

Those were crazy days, and Joe looked like a wild man with his full beard and unkempt hair; he jokes that people sometimes told him he looked like Charles Manson and asked how he had gotten the swastika off his forehead. The car clocked a best-ever 6.18 at 227 back in the day. Still, in 1976, he called it quits on the racing and did a complete 180-degree turn in both life and love.

"Honestly, I felt like sooner or later God was gonna catch up with me for living as crazy as I did. It was time to change. I went to Albany, New York, for a race, and really began to think about what it took-this car cost me everything I made. I never had any money. It didn't make sense anymore."

Joe had also met a young lady he wanted to be serious with. Shifting gears quite seamlessly, he courted and married Miss Vicki Palmer (they are still together now, almost 30 years later) and sold the car to a guy in Atlantic City ("I rolled it off the trailer in the street in front of his place and left"). From that day forward, he only attended one race until 2000 when he got a phone call from Bob Rosetty. Bob, a Meineke muffler franchise owner from Philadelphia, was following clues on an old Funny Car he had bought almost 15 years earlier and wanted to confirm that it was indeed the Rollin' Stoned flopper of the past.

"He's a good guy," says Joe. "I can be pretty hard on the phone, and at first I thought it was a bogus call. He said he wanted to restore it, but I didn't even want to talk to him. I had to get to know him and see whether he was any good."

Now residing in Edgewater, Florida, Joe and Vicki drove to Englishtown, New Jersey, for the first Funny Car reunion in 2002, where Bob was going to debut the restoration.

"They got it out of the trailer and I walked around it a couple of times; it takes me a while to digest things. I thought, Wow. I went over to Bob and said, 'This looks better than I thought it could. Thanks for calling me.'"

The two have a pretty similar attitude about life and hit it off right away. After the NHRA Reunion at Bowling Green in 2003, Bob asked Joe if he wanted to drive it again. So, after a remedial trip through Doug Foley's driving school in West Palm Beach, Florida, Joe was legal. To date, the car has gone as quick as 7.27 at 189 mph though no nitro is in the tank at the moment-just to keep it safe and simple.

The hardest part for Joe to catch up with was using the transbrake as opposed to the slipper clutch he had back in the day. The car wheelstands now too. But the driver is still the same, as is his south Philly accent. And while the crazy days of match racing may be over, Joe Jacono's still going strong. Darwin be damned.

Don't just sit there, do somethin'!Bob Rosetty gets credit for the restoration, though he's the first to admit he had help from lots of friends. After bracket racing the Funny for several years, he got serious about finding out whose it was back in the day. The telling item was the fuel tank and the words "Don't just sit there, do somethin'!" lettered on the injector blister in the cockpit.

The chassis was built by Woody Gilmore with a four-point 'cage on a 116-inch wheelbase (it now has an eight-point 'cage). Cragar Super Trick wheels are on all four corners. The stunning paint is eight-plus coats of PPG Candy Apple Red laid down by Jeff Pisut at VP Auto Body; famed East Coast painter Glen Design (Edison, New Jersey) redid the lettering.

Under the 'glass body is a KB Hemi that Bob built using all-modern parts-Arias pistons, a Crower roller cam, Dart billet heads (Top Fuel circa 1989), homemade headers, and an 8-71 topped off with an Enderle injector. Using a Powerglide derivative built by Miles and coupled to the 1,500-horse mill via a JW Transmission bellhousing, Joe kicks through the gear change with a Hurst shifter; the Dana 60 has 4.56:1 cogs.

Mostly done in-house over the course of two years, Bob and buddies Kevin Wilkenson, Robby Colantonio, Jeff Anderson, Tom Phau, and Todd Hankinson did a great job. Now that Joe is wheeling the 'Cuda again, Bob is in the process of restoring a '74 Vega flopper so they can race each other.

"When I first contacted Joe, my biggest fear was that he would want to drive the car again," says Bob. "After becoming friends with him, I changed my mind. He belongs behind the wheel."